


Precibus

by Parthenopaon



Category: Warcraft - All Media Types, World of Warcraft
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Gen, Hints At Another Rare Pair, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Subtle Undead Courtship, Teldrassil Does Not Burn, Undercity Does Not Fall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:28:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26177995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Parthenopaon/pseuds/Parthenopaon
Summary: Delaryn had failed, failed her soldiers and conscripted defenders, the friends who had looked to her for guidance, but her home need not fall, not if she could hold the warchief here a little longer, stretching the seconds into minutes, the minutes into hours, just long enough for her to discover, to hope...Hope that it would be enough, that this creature had yet a heart Elune could touch, no matter how blackened and desiccated, hope that hatred and grief had not rendered her beyond reason.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 16





	Precibus

There was fire everywhere, fire and death, and the silent hush of waves breaking upon bloodstained sands.

Far out to sea the fleet fled, sails filled by a fortuitous wind. Azerite payloads had wreaked havoc among their numbers, shattering their formation, volatile flames eating through hardened wooden beams as if the ships had been constructed of oil-soaked tinder.

Delaryn watched them go, a low reedy wheeze bubbling between her lips.

_Cordressa…_

Every breath she drew was penance, a price paid in deep, lancing agony. Her ribs were broken, the shattered edges raking along her insides. Five arrows had it taken to fell her, one of which exuded a chill that left her teeth chattering as if she were caught in a blizzard instead of surrounded by fire, her insides numb even as her outsides threatened to burn. Acrid smoke seared her lungs and she coughed, short and harsh. A coppery mist burst from her, its droplets shimmering like rubies in the flickering night.

Fingers frozen around her moonglaive in a talon-like grip, Delaryn pushed herself up, calves flexing against the weight of punctured armor and bone-deep exhaustion. Midway up, while the beach tossed back and forth across her vision, all fire and shadow and writhing bodies, her back seized. Her legs gave out and her knees bore the brunt of the fall, the strain driving the arrows deeper, tearing her lungs to shreds.

Had her blood always been this sweet or was it only the bitterness of failure that made it so?

Maera shouted at her to rise, a bellowing tauren collapsing as she hamstrung then gutted him. Slick innards steamed in the salty ocean wind. But his strength was only second to his bellow, and even as Delaryn strained towards her, the axe took Maera between the plates of neck and shoulder. Maera’s eyes flickered in confusion, bloodied glaive slipping from slack fingers. She opened her mouth to speak, lips moving, forming words, but no sound escaped her. Only a torrent of blood. The brutish weapon had slipped so easily past her guard, hacking deep enough to crush through her torso. And then she too collapsed, her blood fountaining the air in ruby fire.

“No,” Delaryn whispered, her voice as hollow as the space where her conviction had rested.

Desperate to protect the civilians stranded on the shore, the Sentinels, Wardens, and Druids remaining invoked Elune’s name, and leaped upon the Horde marching out of the tree line, hacking and hewing, shredding with tooth and claw. The bloody mist spread further, shimmering bright enough to rival the smoldering husks of the few destroyed catapults. But the Horde was a callous, relentless beast, and one by one Delaryn’s people fell beneath its fury, the horror of losing so many so swiftly incomparable to the icy sphere growing in her gut as she watched new catapults laden with their brutish unholy payload trundle and lurch ever so patiently closer.

She had failed.

This night her home would fall and death would take her, soon but not soon enough. Not enough to spare her this most searing of agonies, a failure more crushing than the inexplicable weight bearing down on her faith: the weight of knowing her people would suffer as their defenders suffered, crushed beneath the all-consuming onslaught of the Horde's grinding warmachine.

The cries of despair, of howling helplessness and desperation sounded so ordinary now as if she had listened to them for four thousand years instead of a handful of hours. But they reached a crescendo, the pitch so high she could not help but flinch. A terrible chill crested over her, slithering through hungering flames and the bodies of the fallen, hooking teeth into her skin until it could sink beneath her flesh. The agony it plucked along the ridges of her spine faded in increments, bleeding out to numb exhausted muscles.

Death itself marched through the billowing smoke onto the beach.

Sylvanas Windrunner did not take her eyes from the world tree. She stalked forward, armor plates clanking, bow sheathed at her back. The flames—so merrily they leaped—avoided her as if she were darkness made flesh, the air around her shimmering with a harrowing, spectral frost. And her eyes—those unholy, molten pits into a cold and depthless maw, they _burned_.

Delaryn had failed, failed her soldiers and conscripted defenders, the friends who had looked to her for guidance, but her home need not fall, not if she could hold the warchief here a little longer, stretching the seconds into minutes, the minutes into hours, just long enough for...

Delaryn blinked, shook her head, eyes widening.

_No._

It cannot be.

_He cannot fall._

He cannot.

What little will she had, hoping that all they needed to do was hold on, every delay bought with the warmth of their blood and the skin of their teeth, sank into the bloodied sand beneath, and Delaryn bent her head, a sob tearing its way from between clenched teeth.

Clasped in the bloodied hand of the Warchief of the Horde, jaw hanging slack, eyes bulging out of his skull, was the shan’do himself.

He had called storm and fury to their aid, guiding their ancestors, scattering the Horde, tearing through hundreds as if they were but chaff blown in by the wind. Mighty enough to shake the earth with every step, yet too gentle to harm so much as a single petal in a field of flowers, Malfurion Stormrage had been the heart of their conviction. And now...

Now even he was food for the worms.

Delaryn bit clear through her lip, blood welling up hot enough to rival the leaping, dancing flames, tears spilling down her cheeks like chips of ice. She looked up as Sylvanas stalked passed, her unholy stare never wavering. Delaryn reached out, her fingers trembling, slow, so slow, falling just short of clasping the warchief’s tattered cloak.

Ears canted imperiously, resolute, Sylvanas halted before the sea, the waves falling just short of breaking over her sabatons. Her long, ashen hair billowed serenely in the wind, as washed of vibrancy and color as her corpse-rot armor and grayish-blue skin.

Blinking away icy tears, blood trickling down her chin, Delaryn gathered the tatters of her will. She pushed to her feet, limbs shaking, trembling like dried branches assailed by a wailing wind. Her teeth dug deeper into her gums, her ascent as slow as if she waded through tar. Her glaive slipped from fingers too weak to grasp. Every step was bought with agony and a bloody mist bursting from her nose. Iron and copper formed a bitter glaze on the tongue, her stumbling so loud it echoed across the sea to shatter upon the bole of the great tree.

Teldrassil, blessed by the Aspects.

Her home.

Hers to defend.

Hers to keep.

And hers to lose should she perish too soon.

“Please—” Delaryn coughed, steps faltering. “Please stop,” she wheezed, her voice so damnably brittle, too hoarse to carry far, too weak to manage a shout. Her hand lashed out as her knees gave way, fingers trembling, slipping from armor slick with the blood of Elune’s chosen.

Sylvanas Windrunner did not react.

Blood dripped from the ragged stump of Shan’do’s throat, dashing upon the shore in a rhythm that spoke of sorrow and despair, and as she looked at him, she on her knees, he held in the grasp of the enemy, Delaryn thought he did not look fearful, no rictus of pain or hatred frozen on his face. Malfurion’s empty bloodshot eyes swept across her face, one of his mighty antlers broken at the base. Tiny, wilted peacebloom petals adorned his hair.

Delaryn struggled to find purchase, splitting her fingernails to the quick on the thick plates and mail rings of Sylvanas’s armor, the pain a barely perceptible sting compared to the glacier chill slithering through her flesh. Finally her fingers found a groove between the metal plates shielding the knee, and Delaryn used her new found hold to drag herself closer. No matter that she was heavier, more muscular, Sylvanas a full head and shoulders shorter had they stood face to face, the undead might as well have been hewn from stone, so motionless neither harrowing storm nor heaving earth could faze her.

“Windrunner, please.” Delaryn would give anything—her pride, what little remained of her life, _anything_ —if it meant keeping the Horde from marching their catapults into the sea. She scrabbled at the Banshee’s thigh with both hands now and finally, as if trudging through a waking nightmare, Sylvanas Windrunner turned her head.

Profane and callous, eyes burning in her skull like rubies backlit by blood and fire, none who looked upon her could ever mistake her for the living elf she had once been.

The creature Delaryn had threatened with torture sprang to mind, his awful raking voice, the damp stench of his breath, flesh giving way like rotten cheese beneath her hands.

He had laughed in her face.

His Dark Lady stared right through her.

Delaryn did not think Sylvanas remembered her. The piercing intensity was lacking from their earlier confrontation, that moment, deep in the heart of the forest, when an arrow wreathed in darkness had shrieked passed Delaryn’s cheek and the Dark Lady had deigned to grace her with a sardonically sadistic smile. Those red, sulfurous eyes scorched from Delaryn’s hands and to her face again, and a subtle shift occurred. Like a firm breeze blowing away a slip of smoke obscuring the eyes, comprehension dawned, banishing whatever thoughts had occupied Sylvanas’s attention. And then only hatred remained.

Hatred and rage.

Had she not already been on her knees, Delaryn would have been struck down as surely as if she had offended the Moon Mother herself. But nothing holy remained in this creature, this husk, and when she spoke, the ringing in Delaryn’s ears peaked so sharply she groaned.

“Remove your hands, or I will remove them for you.”

Despite the tightness around the Banshee’s eyes and the flash of too large fangs, Delaryn dared not release her hold. Her strength was fleeing fast, draining down her back and into her lungs with every reedy breath drawn. Windrunner’s adamant strength was all that kept her from collapsing into a despairing heap.

“Hear me,” Delaryn said, gasping for air, “no resistance remains. Only innocents. _Civilians_. Do not—” A deep, calamitous ache erupted beneath her breastbone, and though she squeezed her eyes shut and opened her mouth to gasp for breath, none came. Her tongue clogged her mouth. Every hacking spasm seemed as if it would be her last. In the distance she could hear someone wheezing, a wet, choking gurgle echoing through the woman’s voice. It—she sounded so familiar. As familiar as the heart laboring beneath her chest and the cold sweat and hot blood streaming down her spine. Delaryn bent forward, forehead striking something hard. Blood trickled into her eye. And all the while she repeated it, as if reciting Mother Moon’s mantra, praying for a wayward miracle: “Only innocents remain in the tree. Only innocents.”

The air around her shifted, growing impossibly colder. The stench of damp stone and ancient darkness assailed her when Sylvanas Windrunner said, in a clear, strangely echoing voice: “Take this. Find a spear and plant it in the surf for all to see. And keep those catapults moving.” She spoke no suggestions. Made no requests. Only iron hard commands, iron, but with the strength of steel ringing throughout.

“As you command, Dark Lady,” a male replied, his voice not unlike that of the grating of boulders thundering down a steep slope.

A sudden weight bent Delaryn’s spine as two hands clapped down on her shoulders, the power behind them so incredible she felt as if she were being driven into the bowels of the earth. Her hands lost their purchase, and when she blinked her eyes open, vision as dim as if she stared into the dark heart of a sloping cave with the noon sun striking her eyes, Sylvanas was far too close. The warchief’s hands were all that supported her, keeping her seated on her haunches instead of crumpling into a sorry heap. Sylvanas had taken a knee, the tatters of her cloak whipping to and fro. The tide was turning, taking the indomitable sea with it, and Delaryn knew the warchief would march her catapults as close as the waterline allowed.

The end had come and she was nose to nose with it, caught in its molten hatred. Sylvanas’s eyes swept across her face, lingering on her bloody lips and drooping ears, flicking to the arrows protruding from her back, before she said, not unkindly, “You will suffer a kinder death than most.”

But Delaryn could not die, not now, not while she had a chance to hold the Banshee in thrall. Like grains of sand draining swifter and swifter through the narrow mouth of an hourglass, draining until nothing remained save returning to the earth to begin the cycle anew, every heartbeat, every word counted thousandfold. Delaryn tried to clear the dry itch from her throat and exploded into a wracking cough, bloody sputum splattering the warchief’s grim visage.

Neither disgust nor surprise broke through her unnatural composure, only a watchful steadiness, as if she could feel death drawing near and could not bring herself to look away lest she miss its passing.

If the trembling beneath Delaryn’s hands and knees was any indication, death was drawing near. But it was death hurled from a massive sling rather than darkness wrought from an arrow, death meant for a home and a people rather than a lone Sentinel.

“Why?” Delaryn wheezed. It hurt to speak. It hurt to breathe. She had never known either with such callous intensity, all paling before the undead queen’s regard. “Our defenders are dead or dying. The tree... Only—”

“—innocents,” Sylvanas responded flatly, never blinking, her voice driving like iron spikes into Delaryn’s skull. “Innocents, like those purged when Brill fell. Innocents, like so many of my people thrown onto pyres, now only ashes drifting on the wind. I know well what your precious sapling contains, Sentinel, and I will take it regardless.” Her voice rang with terrible finality, swirled with soft-spoken cruelty, not unlike an event horizon from which nothing, not even light could return.

Delaryn shook her head, baffled and horrified. “The kaldorei had nothing... _nothing_...” Her voice trailed into a painful, spluttering wheeze. The vice around her chest tightened in time with the Banshee Queen’s hands, tight enough that it seemed almost fit to crush her skull, but Delaryn dared not, would not, _could not_ avert her eyes. “You were defender of your people. You must understand. Must see it.” Had to see how wrong this was, how profane, an echo from days gone, treading in the direct footsteps of he who had made her, twisted her into this abomination, perverting her desire to protect into the need to destroy.

“I never ceased.” Sylvanas lowered her voice into a quiet drawl. “And that is why you understand.” She squeezed further still, steel claws puncturing armor, rending through flesh. The pain barely registered, a streak of smoke in a blizzard, so faint as Delaryn was cradled in thrall by a dark pulsating hatred. “Do you know what the priests of your high and mighty allies consider apt penance for my people? Has curiosity ever compelled you to see what becomes of flesh when hot coals are pushed beneath its fragile expanse? Hear bones crackle and snap while the Light devours them from within?” She spoke so intimately now, almost whispering, a dark, seductive purr, as if they were lifelong friends clasping hands for a final goodbye. “Such was the fate of hundreds of my people, my Forsaken. The Light burns fiercer even than fire, and the agony of it can never be understood by one such as you. But I will try.” Her smile fairly crawled across her face, peeling apart lips the color of darkly curdled bruises, exposing too large fangs and an abyss where her soul ought to be. “As long as I walk these accursed lands, as long my people exist and I beside them, I. Will. Keep. Trying.”

Delaryn shivered, tears burning down her face. “This pain, this suffering must end. There is no justice in this.”

“Indeed.” For a moment, Sylvanas almost seemed impressed. “There is only vengeance and torment.”

“Malfurion is dead. Our defenses crushed, the fleet scattered. You’ve already won.” Delaryn could admire the brilliance of the Horde’s victory, even as she despaired over what was yet to be unleashed. This creature was an abomination, life and nature twisted and broken of all their fundamentals, but her cunning could not be overstated. With Stormwind’s forces bogged down trying to cut a path to the Undercity, Sylvanas and Saurfang had played the Alliance’s most brilliant minds like fairground fiddles.

If this creature could think in such clever turns, then perhaps she could also be reasoned with.

No other recourse remained, not if the kaldorei were to be spared the brutality their defenders had suffered.

Reaching up to cradle Windrunner’s hand in her own, grip weak and trembling, Delaryn tried to win this creature with reason rather than repulse her with poison. “You have already given us pain. Taken so many lives, torn through our lands. But this can end here, before it is too late.” Windrunner watched their joined hands, unblinking, her claws raking across Delaryn’s breastbone, gaze never showing the slightest hint of indecision or hesitation. “Shan’do is gone, but our people remain. And as long as our people remain, Tyrande Whisperwind will listen for any opportunity to save them.”

Windrunner tipped her head to the side. “Listen,” she echoed. “To what I wonder? To whom?” A dangerous growl now, warped by darkness and hatred and a chill so remote it rivaled the frozen depths of the Ulduar Glacier in crushing force.

“To a bargain,” Delaryn wheezed, her thoughts pooling out beneath her in a tide of blood and hope and despair entangled. It was one thing to crush an army; quite another to slay thousands of innocents. As hostages they were of great value, usable in far reaching bargains, but the undead... Did they, could they understand this? Not in the abstract, as one might understand the working of life within a sapling without every baring witness to the growth and bloom of individual leaves. But understand it in their breath catching, heart a thunderous roar as everything they held dear was threatened with a brutal, bloody end? Delaryn did not know. But Windrunner watched and listened, and perhaps the sliver of her that was still elf could understand how profane it would be to desecrate so holy a place. To reap so many lives. “Give Tyrande her beloved’s head. Return her home and her people. End this war before it destroys us all.”

“A generous bargain,” she replied coldly, “seeing as Teldrassil is mine to do with as I please. Why surrender what I have conquered when my home is at this very moment threatened with ruin?”

“For the Horde. For their homes. For your people who yet survive.” Delaryn clenched her jaw. “And the head of he who lead the armies to your door.”

That caught her attention. The full weight of Sylvanas Windrunner’s regard scorched through her with force enough to leave her vision swimming and yet Delaryn dared not blink. This stalemate, having the warchief’s ear; if she could be made to listen, her life would be forfeit, but her people would survive. For that and more, Delaryn would give anything. Even the head of Genn Greymane.

“You once defended your people from the undead. Know what it is like to stare down odds growing slimmer with every breath and body fallen. You know then, how much you would give to prevent it.” Though Delaryn’s shoulders slumped beneath the weight of blood loss and the warchief’s hands—no, this elf’s hands—she had strength enough to lift her head. She had to reach her, that part of Sylvanas Windrunner that had given her life and more to destroy the Lich King in his seat of power. She must understand. No other recourse remained but to pray. To hope... Hope that it would be enough, that this creature had yet a heart Elune could touch, no matter how blackened and desiccated, hope that hatred and grief had not rendered her beyond reason. “Give her these ultimatums, and Tyrande Whisperwind might yet surprise you.”

Windrunner canted her head ever so slightly to the left, considering. Then she bared her fangs once more—so dreadfully sharp, far too broad for a quel’dorei—and a shiver unlike any other slithered up Delaryn’s spine. Her hands grew lighter, as if she made to watch Delaryn fall when she said: “I have allowed the living to surprise me more than enough for three lifetimes.” Her eyes flared, the skin around her eye sockets and upper cheeks looking as if it would burst from the rage contained within her skull. “You have done a great thing for your people. Giving yourself, wasting what little time you have to appeal to compassion where none remains.” Her hands weighed down again, as if she were the anchor keeping Delaryn’s soul tethered to her body. And perhaps she was. This banshee had seen more of death than any mortal being should without permanently passing. “Give me your name, Sentinel.”

Delaryn did not bother to try and keep her tears at bay. She had failed. Faced with the inevitable, what did it matter that this creature be the one to witness her passing? “Delaryn. My name is Delaryn Summermoon, and it is all I have left.”

Sylvanas leaned away then, her eyes tracking towards the mighty boughs of Teldrassil. Her face remained inscrutable, those eyes profane, filled with unfathomable cruelty. But the bitter curl of her lips smoothed out, and Delaryn wondered if a part of her could see it. See the majesty, the beauty, the tens of thousands of souls flickering about its far reaching branches. Not only kaldorei. But dryads, furbolgs and even the dreaded harpies. So much life. So much vibrancy. All to be extinguished. All for a war that knew no end.

“Perhaps one day, when we do not fall upon each other like rabid wolves, you will see it in winter,” Delaryn whispered, her voice hoarse with the liquid agony pooling beneath her breast. “Watch as the cold rolls in with the waves, and the beach ices over, sand crackling with every footstep. Nights so fresh a single crystal can cleanse you of your thoughts. It was a beacon in the constraining dark, and sometimes, when alone, I would sit here and watch and wonder what it would be like to fly high about its branches.” Sylvanas’s claws sank deeper still, as if she were seeking the warmth now fleeing Delaryn breath by breath. Telling her this had no purpose but to unburden herself, but she could not have stopped herself from speaking unless robbed of her tongue altogether. If these were to be her final words, then they would not be words of pleading, but of reverence. “Fly, not on a hippogryph, but as our druids do. Fly high enough to become one with the moons and stars, even if only for a moment.” She tried to squeeze the Banshee’s hand in her own. Instead her strength left her, and her arm fell to her side. She could barely feel her fingers anymore. Her breaths rasped and slowed. And her words came as if from far away. Far enough away that she could feel the darkness enveloping her, not to suffocate, but to liberate from sorrow and despair. “The Crown of the World. _My home_.” Her final resting place.

Heavy. How could her hands be so heavy? Was it simply Delaryn’s own weakness? The massive overlapping armor plates she wore, pauldrons heavy enough to crush a skull beneath their weight?

Delaryn closed her eyes. Rest. She needed rest. So many hours and days spent fighting, mourning the dead, watching friends fall beneath axes, spears, dark wreathed arrows.

The hungering, depthless eyes of an elf that was an elf no longer.

“Look at me.” Though neither suggestion nor request, her tone was quiet yet far from gentle, like a glaive wrapped in bloodstained velvet, soft enough to hide the keen edge, too thin to obscure the cruel intent lurking beneath.

Delaryn blinked against the darkness creeping from the edges of her vision, her eyelids drooping, as if weighed down by blood and suffering and too many deaths, all sensations in her extremities lost to the Banshee’s pervasive chill.

“I offer you a choice, Delaryn Summermoon. A choice I was never given.” She spoke Delaryn’s name with strange inflection, omitting stressors, the syllables almost a dark purr rolling off her blackened tongue. Darkness danced across her shoulders, wreathed down her arms, enveloping Delaryn in arctic chill and never-ending night.

It was not so terrible. Like those nights on the beach, when the tips of her ears and nose were frozen numb, her breath steaming in the air as the star-strewn skies pressed down upon her. Nights when she was so alone and yet so full, a nameless longing drawn from her as only the sight of Teldrassil looming mighty and calm against moons and sea could.

Her hands tightened further, her fingers now halfway into Delaryn’s flesh. “I commend you. For your defiance and ferocity, for your quick thinking and cunning traps. For daring to look me in the eye while I slaughtered your people. You speak of bargains?” Sylvanas’s smile was an empty, callous slash across her face. “Know the darkness as you never have. Join with the dead and the undying.”

Delaryn did not understand.

“Bring me the head of Genn Greymane.”

From the darkness, vast wings unfurled, their feathers luminescent, glowing like icecaps shrouding the depths of a sunless forest. Towering, built as if mountains had been pared down to make way for their boundless strength were three heavily armored women, all wielding weapons of choice. Halberd. Spear. Glaive.

Val’kyr.

Delaryn’s ears flattened against her skull. “Walk with…?” And then she understood.

_A choice I was never given._

“You mean to make me an abomination.” Newfound terror leeched at the fringes of her mind.

“No,” Sylvanas Windrunner said, still maddeningly quiet. “I give you an opportunity.” Mischief sparked in her eyes, and for a moment, she was not a dreadful creature dredged from a putrid, shallow grave, but an elf playing at some cleverly woven game. Delaryn recognized the look well enough. She had worn its like on numerous occasions, occasions during which she challenged her fellow Sentinels to games she was not so certain the priestesses would find agreeable. “Accept, Delaryn Summermoon, and you will stride into history—”

— _as the one who convinced the Dark Lady to spare lives instead of reaping them.’_

A banshee’s true voice was a terrible instrument. Had Delaryn not already been at the threshold of death, its harrowing clamor would have dragged her under as surely as the arrows buried in her back and the darkness clogging her lungs. Like a siren’s musical lilt, it possessed a dark temptation, drawing her in, cradling her—not through claws buried in flesh—but by conjuring images of midnight on a beach, when the moons where hidden and only the stars and a never-ending sea remained. Delaryn could almost feel the spray kiss her cheeks, head tilted to taste the salt and ice streaking in on the wind.

_Ice? During this time of year?_

Beside her a formless mass danced and churned in the wind, collapsing in on itself, twisting in circular patterns until the Banshee Queen stepped from its dark morass. Her eyes immediately sought the great branches of Teldrassil, drinking in the blue and twinkling spheres of light and life.

Drinking in Teldrassil as plucked from Delaryn’s memories.

“We are not here,” Delaryn said, understanding precisely how deep the Banshee had sunk beneath her skin.

There was no acrid smoke scorching her lungs, no ships sinking into the sea, wood burning even as soot-blackened waters battered their cracked hulls. No corpses lying strewn across the beach, blood saturating the sands more thoroughly than sea and salt. And most strikingly off all, there were no catapults trundling along the ever more exposed sands of Darkshore. There was only emptiness and desolation and the faded dreams of gentler times.

“Why?” Delaryn asked. “Why bring me here?”

Sylvanas never once looked her way. “Memories,” she said, her voice at once great and terrible, “are beautiful shackles, binding both the living and the dead. They exist outside of time and space, haunting the deepest recesses of our minds, feeding our fears, but they are not timeless. All of this will one day fade, Delaryn Summermoon, and after the shackles have fallen away and the illusions have faded, only a nameless loss will remain. I give you the chance to right a great wrong. With your life alone. Your life, and that of he who dared strike against my people.” Sylvanas turned to face her then, and Delaryn recoiled.

A grave specter, her face drawn thin by hatred and rage and depthless sorrow, the Banshee’s true essence battered at her frame like a howling gale, rivaling the fiercest winter storms in bleak bitterness. “Slay him and keep your home from becoming a faded memory, or refuse and remain food for the worms. The choice is yours.”

Delaryn shivered, hugged herself, fearing pieces of her might be swept away in the spectral blizzard. “Do you promise this on your honor?”

“I have none to spare.”

Enveloped by a growing darkness, the memory fractured around them, fading into the recesses of her mind, and once more Delaryn bled, the ships burned, and the Banshee Queen wore her own corpse like a second skin. “How then? How will you keep—” She hacked and coughed, her blood spraying the Banshee’s calm visage— “keep your promise? To spare my people?”

“In time you will learn why there is nothing I would not do, no horror I would not commit to protect my people.” Slowly, as if wary of her own strength, Windrunner withdrew her clawed hands.

The blood coursing down her skin was shockingly warm. Delaryn gasped when three pairs of hands halted her collapse, their voices in her mind like a breeze ruffling the tranquil surface of a winter lake.

_‘Will you accept our gift, Delaryn Summermoon?’_

_‘Walk with us through the endless dark?’_

_‘Join with the Dark Lady of your own free will?’_

Delaryn squeezed her eyes shut, tears burning her chilled skin. This was no true choice, for there was nothing she would not give, no price she would not pay to spare her people. Even an afterlife spent strolling through moonlit forests surrounded by the Children of the Stars. “I do.”

“No,” Sylvanas snapped. “Look at me.” The demand was callous with suppressed rage.

Delaryn shivered. She could not raise her head, every breath like shards of glass dragging across soft insides. She watched, mouth gone oddly dry, as the Banshee Queen tore a clean strip from her tattered crimson cloak. And then with a tenderness no such abomination had a right to possess, she tilted Delaryn’s chin up. Soft silk brushed her cheeks. The Banshee’s rage filled visage softened, as if Delaryn’s tears had burned them both.

“Do not weep,” Sylvanas commanded brusquely. “Death can be ki—” She blinked. Looked from Delaryn to the tearstained cloth, confusion dimming her eyes. For just a moment, lasting barely half a heartbeat, while tendrils of darkness still linked their minds and the moons shone down with startling intensity, the tattered cloth was no cloth, but a single golden petal.

And the Banshee Queen a banshee no longer.

Beneath the timeless summer skies of a land Delaryn had never known, the Ranger-General frowned, her long hair shimmering a lustrous white-gold, small flowers blooming between the wavy tresses like sparks of captured sunlight.

Obscuring half the sky and swallowing whole the horizon, the White Lady gazed down upon a sprawling plain of sunblessed tulips, the Blue Child tucked close at her side.

Silence reigned. Silence and a laboring heartbeat that was not Delaryn’s own.

“No,” Sylvanas whispered. Her voice did not echo. Her eyes did not burn. No tearstains marred her face, a face that though severe in its plains and angles, was not as gaunt as that of the haunt Delaryn knew her to be.

Delaryn saw her then, laid bare beneath looming moon and half-remembered sun. “I see you,” she said, voice fading into the deafening silence. Saw the woman hidden beneath the Banshee’s grave visage, a grievous wound of the past, carried ever and on beyond death into this bleak and accursed existence.

Defender of her people.

An elf with eyes as plain a grey as your everyday summer storm.

Blood drained from the Ranger-General’s golden visage like water from a sieve, a cold, putrid wind sweeping across the field as her eyes flicked over Delaryn’s shoulder and into the distance. The petal, its luster faded into black-veined ash, slipped from her grasp. Mute horror flashed across her face as darkness crested over them.

The val’kyr spread their wings, shielding them from prying eyes, and Delaryn watched, awestruck and horrified as Sylvanas Windrunner, Banshee Queen of the Forsaken and Warchief of the Horde, bowed her head, rotted flowers falling slowly from her ashen hair.

_I am dead_ , Delaryn thought.

No longer dying. A hallucination.

_A delusion born of hope._

The dead could not weep.

They must not weep.

If they did—if they could, then everything the living thought they knew of these creatures might be wrong.

Perversion of nature.

_Abomination._

Hatred made manifest.

Snarling over a piece of cloth, black tears staining her cheeks.

_Tears..._

A warning thrill shivered up Delaryn’s spine, not unlike the first steps taken into a moonwell, when her injuries and exhausted muscles yet protested its healing warmth and soothing balm.

Rage marred the Banshee’s visage, her gauntlet creaking alarmingly as she clenched her fist. But it was rage turned inwards.

Hatred and rage and soul searing sorrow, life and duty broken, twisted, the Banshee a shattered mirror of the Ranger-General. But no matter the warped differences, this creature had once tasted life. She had given everything of herself and received only torment and cruelty in return.

With the last bit of life left to her, using little more than hope and will, Delaryn raised her hand. The tremors were violent, her flesh utterly numb. It cost her everything to trace the darkened paths icy tears had burned into the Banshee Queen’s cheek.

Sylvanas recoiled from her touch.

Delaryn couldn’t speak. An aching lump blocked her throat. Clogged her nose. Burst from her in a spray of red. She collapsed against Sylvanas and the last thing she remembered before the darkness dragged her under was a whisper, cold as ice, rasping from her numbed lips: “Remember...”

X

“Keep moving forward,” Saurfang bellowed, waving the catapult crews on. The shaman went before them, rolling bodies out of the way and steadying the wet sands of the beach. Slowly but surely, with all the brutal efficiency he had expected of his soldiers, he watched the armaments trundle forward.

His nod of approval was met with deafening cheer.

The Horde was victorious. The kaldorei resistance slain or captured, their navy scattered by azerite payloads that had eaten through wood as if the ships had been but hollow twigs sailing into a raging inferno. And best of all, the plan had worked.

Malfurion Stormrage was dead, slain by the warchief’s hand.

Saurfang grimaced. His axe was heavier now, bloodied with the knowledge that he had acted in spite of himself and the honor he held so dear. But the warchief had taken the vast burden into her own hands, though he doubted she viewed it such at all.

Killing was to Sylvanas Windrunner like breathing was to the living: noticeable only when you had precious little of it left to do.

“All is prepared, High Overlord,” a runner said, towering over him, her molten brown eyes raging with the fires spread across the beach.

Saurfang nodded, and clapped a hand to her shoulder. This tauren was young yet, the ridges along her horns far fewer than he had yet seen save for those of Baine Bloodhoof. “Tell them they have done well. You have all done well. Be vigilant but know your rewards will be threefold.”

Her tail swished when she bowed her head and thumped her chest. “As you say, High Overlord.” Though her tone was formal, she could not keep the giddiness from her steps as she loped back to the crews.

Saurfang’s smile cut off as abruptly as it formed. There was a dark tremor in the air. A sick pit opened up below his sternum, and he watched, tusks bared, as three of the warchief’s val’kyr descended from on high. He did not know what information the dying night elf had given her, but Saurfang knew well those creatures served only one purpose: tearing the dead from their rightful graves.

They had spoken nothing of raising kaldorei, and the very thought of walking beside those the Horde had cut down like chaff made his hackles bristle.

This was wrong.

Dishonorable.

As if sensing his intentions, Blightcaller slipped from the flickering shadows, his glowing eyes affixed to Saurfang’s. The bared sword clasped causally in his hand spoke volumes the undead need not articulate in words.

_Do not interfere._

Saurfang stared him down and snorted in disgust.

The battle had been won, true enough, but the war for the Horde’s survival was only now taking its first steps on a long road fraught with danger and intrigue. No word had reached them of the Undercity’s fall, and if Teldrassil could be secured before Greymane took the city, the stalemate would force them to fight out this war in words rather than paint their peoples in blood and slaughter.

Let the warchief have her toys. As long as she kept her eyes on the survival of the Horde and the clean occupation of Teldrassil, Saurfang would raise no hand.

Though he certainly would not refrain from giving her a well deserved earful.

X

“We’ll never again march side by side into battle, will we?” Cordressa asked softly. Delaryn would not meet her eyes, staring instead across the sea, to where Teldrassil loomed mighty and bright, life twinkling among its branches like new struck stars.

“I cannot say where our paths will lead us but…” She shook her head, a frown marring her brow. A long, sloping cut disappeared into her hairline, the flesh parted deep enough to expose pale bone. “No matter how far apart fate takes us, know that if ever you require aid, I will always be there.”

“Make no vows your warchief will force you to break, Delaryn.”

“There will always be a place for you beside me.” And Delaryn held out her hand, palm up, green-stained fingers trembling even through the unnatural stillness of undeath. “If there is one thing I regret, Cordressa, it is that I let you go so easily.” Her lips quirked into a half-remembered smile, and for half a heartbeat, beneath the embrace of Lady Elune, she was not a horror dredged from an undug grave, but Delaryn as she had been, when her pinkish skin had glowed with vitality rather than the pallor of undeath, and her eyes had been radiant blue rather than banked crimson. “Save me a goblet of mulled wine when next we meet?”

And though Cordressa doubted they would unless it was across a battlefield on opposite sides of the divide, she took Delaryn’s hand, tugging her friend into a firm embrace, hoping against hope that Delaryn would remember always that she was loved. “Elune guide your steps through the darkness.”

X

Home.

Sylvanas stared across the vast desolation of blackened earth, bent, twisted trees and the waves breaking upon the shore far below, and felt...

_Nothing._

The mists rolling in off the sea could not have been so cold.

Windrunner Spire loomed tall and dark against the overcast sky, heavy billowing clouds sparking lightning and thunder far out to sea. But there was not a single whisper of wind, no sigh of the storm, and her hair fell down her cuirass as limp and pale and washed out by dying day as it was by fallen night.

It was a day for memories.

A day for ghosts.

She stalked the thin, winding path down to the beach, every silent step leaving small puffs of grayish dust floating in her wake. As solitary as the decaying spire, she was the only speck of color in the fading wasteland, her armor as putrid as rotted blood and dull as tarnished silver. The necklace clanked against her armor with every step, thick chain links cradling her neck like a noose, and by the time she halted before the shattering waves, the sun had begun its sullen, inexorable descent into the sea.

Black waters broke over her boots, the tepid spray dotting her impassive face. She ripped the pendant from her neck, links breaking with low, plaintive clinks. She held it up high, keen eyes searching the precious gems for any flaw in their setting. The flat silver disk showed signs of scuffing, a minor bend pushing the sapphire closer to the ruby and emerald. It looked so sad then, out of alignment, gems dulled, held up against the dying sun and hungrily churning clouds. Numerous times had she thrown it away, hurling it with all her might and a silent cry, only to come crawling back as many times and more, desperate hands sifting through ashen earth and exposed bones as banshees flocked to her presence like flies swarming a bloated corpse.

Why?

It was nothing more than a glorious lie.

A foolish, festering hope.

Her family was a bleak, failing ruin, a cruel reflection of their childhood home.

There was nothing left for her here, and yet she could not help but return.

If a corpse could be haunted, could the same be said of a ghost?

A flicker of light, swift, flashing like a wayward ray of midday sunlight drew her attention to the cliffs.

Delaryn dismounted, her skeletal steed shaking its head as if tossing a long and glorious mane. Her steps were near silent on the dead, dusty path, all her weapons save the glaive at her side left on her horse. The thing nickered, ghostlike and ethereal, and Sylvanas’s steed raised its horns in invitation. Together the two clattered out of sight, nipping at each other with decaying teeth.

Delaryn paid their rapid disappearance no heed. All her attention, all her concern was for Sylvanas. Her eyes flicked from the pendant to the spire and then to Sylvanas’s eyes, her ears canting down as she said: “Marrah is waiting in Eversong Forest.”

Sylvanas’s grip tightened, and slowly, creaking plaintively, the metal began to warp beneath her cruel insidious strength. “Take her and leave. This is no place for weaklings.” A low, keening edge laced her voice as she all but hissed the last word, the mists crawling up the beach darkening as shadows seeped between the grooves of her armor.

Delaryn’s ears flattened against her skull, but she did not back away, did not halt her approach until she stood close enough to loom, the embers in her eyes glowing brighter as the light around her died a slow crushing death. “You do not believe that,” she said softly. Her sickly pink skin was marbled with dark, desiccated veins, a thin scrape along her jaw exposing muscles as worn and thick as old sailcloth. Delaryn held out her hand. A greenish residue stained her fingertips and she smelled of freshly harvested flowers and sharp mountain air.

Not old stone, desperate death or rusted blood.

But crisp and fresh, as if life still clung to the edges of her being.

“We worry for you, Dark Lady.”

Sylvanas turned away before the bitterness burning her tongue could morph into a bone shattering shriek. Before she said something she would regret forevermore. Before Delaryn could gaze too long into her eyes and see the same desolation reflected within as was without. She did not blame Marrah for waiting in the forest below, nor Cyndia for staying away altogether, watching over Undercity while she went crawling into the rot of her suffering. Perhaps it was they who were the stronger for having broken their bonds to this place while Sylvanas was the weakling grasping desperately at flickering wisps and the memories of a youth long gone. Crawling back, time and again, haunting her childhood home as surely as she haunted her own corpse.

A banshee sobbed nearby and Sylvanas grit her teeth so hard her fangs punctured her lower lip.

She bled nothing more than cold, viscous darkness. Her fist clenched tighter, the disk warping, slow cracks spreading through the gems. She would have crushed it into an unrecognizable ball of metal and dust had Delaryn not brushed calm, ungloved fingers through the shadows trailing from her wrist. Sylvanas hissed out an unnecessary breath.

Delaryn’s touch burned.

Like a brand.

Like fire melting flesh.

Like light bleeding night, exposing the shadows for the empty facades they were.

“Call to them,” Delaryn said, “and let us leave this place. They should not be left to grieve in these desolate ruins.”

“They are wild, broken,” Sylvanas snapped. “Nothing remains of the rangers they were in life and there is no place for fragmented shades among us.”

Just as there was no place for sympathy, for kindness, for smiles in the dark, and comfort and silence found resting side by side.

“You do not believe that either.” Delaryn spoke with such quiet certainty, as if she could understand their failure. Understand their grief and everlasting agony.

More banshees clustered closer, wild-haired and wide-eyed, spectral dresses billowing in an unnatural wind. Though their elongated mouths opened and closed, they were as silent as dust settling over a forgotten sepulcher, long, grasping fingers reaching out with great hesitance.

“Don’t you see? For all that they have lost, for all that they have forgotten, they remember you still.” Delaryn’s eyes never left her, never flared with hatred or rage. “They are your rangers, your sisters in death.” She looked at Sylvanas as if she were still the Ranger-General who had fallen among a sunstruck sea in full bloom, flowers rotting in her hair even as her tears seared into her cheeks. “Do not bury your grief here. They deserve better. Your people deserve better. And so do you.” And Delaryn carefully peeled her fingers from the pendant, uncaring of the darkness lashing at her exposed flesh. “Cyndia told me that every ghost has her binding, every banshee a branding grief. I will never understand but I don’t think you’ve ever grieved for yourself, and until you do this place, these memories will remain a poison.”

Deep below her sternum, in a place where only ice and darkness lurked, something spasmed frantically, urging her to rip the pendant away before Delaryn could hurl it into the greedy ocean.

Instead, Delaryn removed a piece of red velvet from a pocket, the stained cloth ripped and torn around the edged. She wrapped the pendant with an almost studious care, fingertips never once touching either the stones or the fine lettering carved into their inlay.

Sylvanas despised her melancholy bearing, her uncommon tenderness, the foolish expression on her face and the calm radiance she projected into her surroundings. Had her presence grated, it would have been easier to dispose of her, to command the val’kyr undo their grave mistake. To pretend she repulsed her fellow Dark Rangers rather than drawing them in as surely as her touch scorched through Sylvanas’s numbed flesh.

Along with the wrapped necklace, Delaryn offered her a crown. Not a crown of gold or silver or iron. But a crown woven of flowers sealed in a thin layer of frost.

Sylvanas blinked. She had not seen such a burst of color in a decade and more, blue and silver so crystalline the lilies, icecaps and silversage appeared cast from ice and sapphires. They called to mind mountain fields and snowbound valleys she had known only through eyes not her own, days when the cold could still seep into bones, stealing warmth as eagerly as it blanketed paling flesh.

“A gift,” Delaryn said, “for a new nightfall.”

Sylvanas took both gifts with hesitance, her shadows never loosening their hold. “I need no crown.” Not when her corpse sufficed as a macabre symbol of rule.

Delaryn watched the dark tendrils coiling up her arm, curiosity sparking in her banked eyes. “Even the mightiest oak and its deepest roots need support. And that is why we are here, why your rangers anxiously await your return.” A wry smile graced her lips. “Anya will have our hides if we dare return without you.”

_I need none of you._

Sylvanas did not say it aloud because she knew even her blackened tongue couldn’t grip the words firm enough to spit them true. She was the pillar her people clung to, the bleak, darkened heart of Undercity, but so too was she one of numerous among the fallen.

She did not know if a ghost could itself be haunted, but if so, perhaps Delaryn had the right of it.

If she could call Areiel and Nathanos back from the depths, wresting the weakened Lich King’s grasp from their minds, then given enough time and effort, these lost banshees too might piece together the fragments of their psyche.

As she might learn to grieve for the woman she had left buried among the ruins of Windrunner Spire, and the family she had lost long before she lost herself.

The crown gleamed like moonblessed ice, bleeding a soothing calm into the air, and Sylvanas wondered if Delaryn understood the ramifications of the gift and its giving. Of the Dark Lady’s personal acceptance.

The banshees clustered close and closer, darkness and frost lancing the air as the storm finally broke. The torrential rain seemed to wash them clean from the world, soaring mists rising up to obscure the spire, the pattering raindrops forming a curious halo around Delaryn’s Summermoon’s dark blue hair.

“Cover your ears.” Her banshee’s lament was not for Delaryn to hear. Not yet.

She sang to her fallen rangers in the language of ghosts and grief and nightfall, guiding them all home through the descending darkness.

**Author's Note:**

> This story started out as three sentences and an exercise in cumulative sentence building, and almost became another rare pair fic. It's definitely the most fun I've had with writing in some time. 
> 
> Please feel free to let me know if you've enjoyed it.


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